Author Archives: Katie Sticca

  Hot, but with a breeze,     and the breeze carries something         faintly seen. Small glistenings   against the pines. It is the     day’s zenith, and the summer’s.         A … Read More

  Blue jay screams in the almost wilderness— she Wants she Wants she Wants.   Nothing but flames will grow in this wind.   Back and forth the blind mice scuttle. Their nation crumbles and thrives.

  For months I carried a bluebird. Its breath, dark berries. Its eyes were pebbles. In my pocket, its wings fluttered from time to time. Summer was not enough to sustain me. When I was sad, I took it out, dreamed … Read More

  [T]hey are so stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages.” – Virginia Woolf, “Craftsmanship”   It really is, your suspicion notwithstanding, always like this. And you never really get over it. And the … Read More

  I’m drinking coffee with Melissa, telling her about an idea for a poem called The Encyclopedia of Small but Significant Gestures,   in which I explore the gesture of pressing my fingertips against my eyelids when I’m trying to … Read More

  Was it a cloud or a pillar of fire that led you lost people through the desert?   And were you lost, or merely uncertain as I feel nearly every day now?   And when you say “wandered,” do … Read More

  You must think that I forgot or are neglecting you, which is not at all true,   you are often in my thoughts. How to write you. Polycentric. Brazzaville sister.   Daughter (as I am). Two precolonial villages coincided … Read More

  The sea for miles like the table of God. Our powder blew and the sea rushed in.   The mast’s a burning candle offered And I’m the flame that will not last.

  Some say I no longer wear one, dismissing the slip—and here, we’re not talking panniers, dimity pockets, or pantalets with open crotches but   see:  chemise—so mid-twentieth- century that women are reminded: Liz Taylor fulfilled one to lure Paul … Read More

  You are the elbow. You, bone to a point, a rule for movement, marble-   hard and you are palms to pull and pound our only rooms, to palm the keys,   to key our voices to a chorus. … Read More

  Shear back the thorns, the thistles, the body   of rosebushes growing along the fence line. Summer will not give   and the dog is digging up rows of beds,   drought-driven and bare.   We have it backwards: … Read More

    Green shutters—white house.   Paper whites in the weak western light.   Brown mouse and its brown hush   across the stairs, four daughters   brushing long brown hair.  Brown   beer in Black Label cans, black bible … Read More